By being more calculatingly precise than he ever needed to be, Mitt Romney has, characteristically, opened a multifront offensive -- against himself. All that Mittsifying business about creating or helping to create a cool 100,000 jobs? The Washington Post's Fact Checker has now revised its earlier one Pinocchio to three, and this revision would seem to come, in no small part, from Bain Capital itself, now hunkered into self-defense mode:
[In refuting the Wall Street Journal's analysis] Bain appears to be rejecting a central premise of Romney’s calculation — that years after the investment ended, one can attribute either good news or bad news about the company to Bain’s involvement.
Romney Inc., it further appears, either never learned or has forgotten perhaps the most fundamental rule of campaigning: Explaining is losing. His invention of the 100,000-jobs-created is clearly deficient, yet he must now explain it and justify it and defend it in perpetuity against all investigative journalists and political opponents -- an explanation-justification-defense he can no longer credibly revise. He's stuck with explaining, which, in politics, is losing. And he did it to himself.